I spent an interesting day yesterday on a course led by Anne-Marie Dahl, a futurologist (I'm sure I don't remember meeting futurologists when I was a child but now I've met three in less than a year!) about finding out how future trends can be used to plan the future. The topic was not entirely new to me as I have been consulting sources such as the Horizon Report regularly. What was new for me was the idea that for every tendency there is a counter-tendency such as the globalisation-glocalisation pair. And what we did was to explore many possible futures with the help of opposing quadrants setting one mega trend and its counter against another pair.
In the end I wondered if this neat pattern was not a little bit too neat. For example glocalisation is only possible as a concept because of globalisation. So the two kind of go together. A real counter tendency to globalisation would be to block out modern communications altogether which is perhaps more the 'simple living' idea but that concept was used as the counter to so called 'turbo-living'.
Another device used in our discussions was to take a ten year time frame as this is thought to be sufficiently distant for us to avoid thinking that things would be much the same as before and yet close enough for us to have some idea and some stake in what things might be like then.
The mega trends can be divided into financial, environmental and values and I was reluctant to take on the value trends as I don't think that values are prone to such drastic change that they would make a difference over the ten year period.
Then today I found this amazing article from the Guardian with a four hundred year perspective on why depression has become more prevalent (because we have forgotten how to have fun) which made me wonder about the value of a ten year perspective!
Keywords: futurology, mega-trends
